Morse Code: A Summer Project that Could Save Your Life

Several years ago, my husband read Cheaper by the Dozen aloud to our family. As a family with 12 children ourselves, we all loved the Gilbreth’s stories and could easily relate to many of them. One of my favorite parts of the book was seeing the creative (and somewhat sneaky) ways the father found to teach his kids useful knowledge (such as Morse code) — even during their summer vacations.

Among other things, this efficiency expert…

• put a record player in the bathroom so kids could listen to foreign language lessons each morning while dressing
• painted and labeled all the planets of the solar system on their wall
• left secret messages in morse code and gave prizes to first child to figure them out

Keep in mind, this was well before the days of Google. How would the kids know how to translate those morse code messages? Their dad printed a mnemonic on the wall to help them remember it. We are given only the first few letters in the book, but I extrapolated from there to make the following chart for my own children:

Since today (April 27) is Samuel Morse’s birthday — inventor of the telegraph and creator of the code used to send messages across it — I printed out this little list and taught it to my kids and grandkids this morning.

I also took another page out of Frank Gilbreth’s book and composed several messages for the kids to decipher, awarding a prize to the one to finish first. I’ll come back in another week or so and share those messages here, once they’ve had a chance to translate all those messages.

Every family should learn how to send an S.O.S. signal, as it is the international code signal of extreme distress, used especially by ships at sea. Hopefully, you’ll never need to use it, but just knowing dot-dot-dot dash-dash-dash dot-dot-dot might someday save your life. Use it to bang on pipes, flash lights, knock on walls, or even blink your eyes to let others know you need help

At the very least, studying Morse code makes a great hands-on history lesson. Our children got their first taste of sending, receiving, and translating telegraph messages at a museum near Denver, CO (although the code posted in the photo below was American Morse Code and differs slightly from the International alphabet shared in our printable.

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